” A burgeoning subculture of 3-D printed gun enthusiasts dreams of the day when a lethal firearm can be downloaded or copied by anyone, anywhere, as easily as a pirated episode of Game of Thrones. But the 27-year-old Japanese man arrested last week for allegedly owning illegal 3-D printed firearms did more than simply download and print other enthusiasts’ designs. He appears to have created some of his own.

Among the half-dozen plastic guns seized from Yoshitomo Imura’s home in Kawasaki was a revolver designed to fire six .38-caliber bullets–five more than the Liberator printed pistol that inspired Imura’s experiments. He called it the ZigZag, after its ratcheted barrel modeled on the German Mauser Zig-Zag. In a video he posted online six months ago, Imura assembles the handgun from plastic 3-D printed pieces, a few metal pins, screws and rubber bands, then test fires it with blanks.

“ Freedom of armaments to all people!!” he writes in the video’s description. “A gun makes power equal!!”

It’s been a full year since I watched the radical libertarian group Defense Distributed test fire the Liberator, the first fully printable gun, for the first time. Imura is one of a growing number of digital gunsmiths who saw the potential of that controversial breakthrough and have strived to improve upon the Liberator’s clunky, single-shot design. Motivated by a mix of libertarianism, gun rights advocacy and open-source experimentation, their innovations include rifles, derringers, multi-round handguns and the components needed to assemble semi-automatic weapons. Dozens of other designs are waiting to be tested.

The result of all this tinkering may be the first advancements that significantly move 3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.”

” In the summer of 1965, just before riots broke out in Watts, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a study on crime in a “free society.” Among its recommendations was developing a technology for handling unruly citizens. A patrolman ought to have a “nonlethal” way to incapacitate a criminal, one that worked quickly and with little risk of lasting injury. “For example,” the study’s authors wrote, “darts have been used for injecting tranquilizing drugs into animals.”

Cops were already using cattle prods with the same goal.

In Mississippi, a pair of Freedom Riders were zapped while in custody in 1961. Two years later, newspapers described for the first time how Alabama policemen used cattle prods to “herd Negro demonstrators.” This led to widespread public outrage, says Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College who has traced the history of electric crowd control, and the cattle prod — or “shock baton” — fell out of favor.

Inventors rushed to find replacements. In 1965, a Massachusetts man filed a patent for a long-range weapon that worked like an electrified supersoaker. The following year a Japanese inventor proposed an air gun that fired two electrode needles that would “stun the criminal to a temporary state of false epilepsy, which renders him helpless.” Neither caught on.

“ Hundreds and hundreds of different patents were made,” Rejali says, “but it’s one thing to have a great idea, and another thing to have a lot of social institutions that will sustain it and carry it forward into society.” Even the Taser, the device Jack Cover patented in 1974, wasn’t all that different from the ones that came before: A pair of electrode projectiles, tethered to the gun with wires, delivered a high-voltage, low-amperage pulse of electricity that could subdue a target without killing him. Cover tried to sell his invention in any way he could, Rejali says, even marketing it to airlines to fight hijackers.”

Fueled Presents: 40 Years Of Cellphone

” Starting with the DynaTAC in 1974 and ending with a side-by-side comparison between the iPhone 5s and the Galaxy Note, Fueled’s designers and animators crafted the 40-year history of the mobile cell phone. For some it will be a walk down memory lane, for others a history lesson.

Fueled’s Design Team describes the short video as Art Deco, a style characterized by its bold geometric shapes and rich colours. It’s a very eclectic style, deriving taste from a broad range of sources — some representing the machine age. You’ll notice the snappy animation style reflects the lightning fast transformation and evolution of cellphones.

While the film may have ended with the first model of an iPhone, Fueled decided to dig into the evolution of Apple’s iPhone and compare it to top Android phones. It’s remarkable how little the iPhone’s aesthetic has changed in contrast to Android models, which are becoming larger and changing constantly.

What will the next 40 years look like? Fueled’s Founder Rameet Chawla says, “While I don’t know exactly when, it’s only a matter of time before the cellphone will be completely obsolete.”

If you recognize the voice in the script, you’ll know it’s from an old advertisement from 1980s for DynaTAC. At the time, no one knew how big mobile would become and that this one man’s prophecy would come true.”

” Don Kates is professor emeritus of constitutional and criminal law specializing in gun ownership and gun control issues. He is also a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and is the editor of Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy (1984).

In this lecture at a San Francisco Libertarian Party event in 1989, Kates gives a history of gun ownership in America and speaks about the historical implications of the right to self-defense.”

” About now, many Americans wish they had never heard the term debt ceiling — or knew so much about what it meant. But with lawmakers hesitant to approve an increase in the amount that the U.S. government is authorized to pay for debts already incurred by Congress, this phrase has become a household word, as it were. Although it feels like this latest gridlock between Congress and President Barack Obama is yet another indication of today’s steely partisan politics, debt-ceiling conflicts have been to one degree or another Washington staples for the past four decades. Before the 1970s, not so much.

The first time the debt ceiling came into view was in 1917 with the adoption of the Second Liberty Bond Act, which placed limits on expenditures for large categories of debt such as bonds and bills. Before then, Congress had to authorize loans and other debt instruments individually. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to remove the $30 billion ceiling on Treasury bonds. And soon afterward, Congress eliminated individual limits for specific types of debt, leaving only one aggregate ceiling for the government’s total indebtedness. This gave the Treasury Department more flexibility in determining the types of instruments it issued.”

Brian Palmer of Slate provides a very informative article on the subject . It is a must read.

” The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929,
when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s,
staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists
attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels
since the 1960s.”